Archive for June, 2009

Flash Catalyst, Adobe’s new visual interface design tool, has reached Beta 1 and is available to the public!

Adobe® Flash® Catalyst™ is a new professional interaction design tool for rapidly creating user interfaces without coding. With Catalyst, you can:

Transform artwork created in Adobe Photoshop® and Adobe Illustrator® into functional user interfaces.

Create interactive prototypes with the ability to leverage them in the final product

Publish a finished project as a SWF file ready for distribution

Work more efficiently with developers who use Adobe Flash Builder™ 4 to create rich Internet applications (RIAs). Designers use Flash Catalyst to create the functional user experience then provide the project file to developers who use Flash Builder to add functionality and integrate with servers and services.

I’ve been working with the tool for a while now and I think it’s awesome. Designers, as well as the developers who work with them, will really appreciate the workflow that Catalyst enables. Designers don’t need to learn code, and developers don’t need to recreate designs in code.

Here are some of the resources that are available for the Beta 1 release:

Richard Harrington and Marcus Geduld at Peachpit Press have just released a new book about Flash and After Effects. They do a great job of explaining each application in terms that users of the other application can understand. It’s a great mapping between the functionalities of the 2 applications. They also provide a lot of information about how to use the applications in concert with one another.

Peachpit Press has made these two chapters available on their website:

The rest of the book goes on to explain how you do creative and production work in each of these applications and then move the pieces and outputs back and forth to get the best of both. But you have to buy the book to get those parts. I’m pretty sure that many of you will do just that as soon as you see the value in the introductory chapters.

Thank you, Richard and Marcus, for creating a two-way information bridge between these two applications.